Friday Roundup – Great Posts in SaaS, CRM, and Customer Success

In this week’s Friday roundup, we’ve captured great posts on SaaS, Customer Success and CRM.

SaaS

9 very sound tips compiled from professional experiences, collected and published by the Young Entrepreneur Council. Tip #9: measure the cost of building vs buying – good insight, however building in-house is very likely not a more cost-efficient option. Once you build it you need to consider supporting, maintaining and updating it and if this is sustainable for your organization. Do you want to jeopardize your own product delivery by using development resources? SaaS subscriptions have a low barrier to entry (a monthly fee) and since the product is their focus, not yours, you’ll receive support and new features on a regular basis:

Most of the companies we’ve spoken to find it challenging to staff up their customer success organization. The description we hear most often is that it takes an individual with a unique combination of art and science – understanding the customer and the technical details of the product offering. Chirag Mehta shares what to look for when hiring a Chief Customer Success Officer in this post. Perhaps you aren’t staffing at that level, but the attributes can carry to team members as well:

CRM

The demand for modern technology customer relationships is driving refreshed or expanded integration and usage of all areas of CRM software. However, companies can ill afford to divert scarce development resources to acquire it – which is likely why Gartner is predicting CRM software revenue is forecast to reach $23.9 billion in 2014, with cloud revenue accounting for 49%. SaaS- or cloud-based CRM deployments currently represent more than 40% of all CRM deployments, and look set to reach 50% during 2015: